Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Changing the UUID of a VirtualBox Virtual Disk Image in Linux

11th July 2021

Recent experimentation centring around getting my hands on a test version of Windows 11 had me duplicating virtual machines and virtual disk images though VirtualBox still is not ready for the next Windows version; it has no TPM capability at the moment. Nevertheless, I was able to get something after a fresh installation that removed whatever files were on the disk image. That meant that I needed to mount the old version to get at those files again.

Renaming partially helped with this but what I really needed to do was change the UUID so VirtualBox would not report a collision between two disk images with the same UUID. To avoid this, the UUID of one of the disk images had to be changed and a command like the following was used to accomplish this:

VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid [Virtual Disk Image Name].vdi

Because I was doing this on Linux Mint, I could call VBoxManage without need to tell the system where it was as would be the case in Windows. Otherwise, it is the sethduuid portion that changes the UUID as required. Another way around this is to clone the VDI file using the following command but I had not realised that at the time:

VBoxManage clonevdi [old virtual disk image].vdi [new virtual disk image].vdi

It seems that there can be more than way to do things in VirtualBox at times so the second way will remain on reference for the future.

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